He blew upon his tea as Mrs. Doddridge had suggested, and then took a cautious sip. The taste was like the cakes but clearer and more pleasingly astringent, like a hot breeze blowing through his phantom mind and body rather than like anything substantial. Michael thought that he was as contented and relaxed as he had ever been, sitting with friends in this somehow familiar kitchen that he’d never seen before. The chatter of the other people at the table was receding to a distant murmur – Reggie asking Bill what the best bait would be to lure a ghostly mammoth, Tetsy Doddridge wondering aloud to Marjorie if having two gang-members with the surname Warren might not be confusing for the readership – but Michael was no longer bothering to keep up with the various conversations. He munched on his fairy cake and drank his fairy tea, discovering that these were reawakening in him the thrilling sense of marvel that he’d felt when Phyllis had first pulled him up into Mansoul.
Back then, when it had all been new to him, he’d been completely mesmerised by every surface and each texture, getting lost in woodgrain or the worn pink threads of Phyllis Painter’s jumper. Though he hadn’t noticed it occurring, since then his appreciation of the wonderful displays surrounding him h
ad grown more dull and blunted, as if he were coming to take this extraordinary afterlife and all its finery for granted. Not until his faculties had been enlivened by this vicarage tea-party had Michael realised how complacent he’d become, or how much he was missing. Now he looked around him at the kitchen with its milky morning light and the dear scuffs or marks of wear on its utensils, glorying in all the humble wonders and the profound sense of home that they entailed.
His gaze alighted on the decorative tiling of the fireplace beside him and he saw for the first time its stupefying detail. Each tile had a different scene delineated on it in the graded blue tones of a willow pattern saucer, fine lines of rich navy on a background of an icier and paler shade. After a moment or two, Michael understood that the square panels were arranged in order so that all the separate pictures told a story, like they did in Alma’s comics. If that was the case, it seemed to him that the most sensible place to commence the tale would be the bottom left side of the fire’s surround, next to where he was sitting.
Looking down, he was immediately absorbed in the depicted episode, his enhanced vision swimming in its deep blue intricacies until with a start he comprehended that it was almost an image of himself, a small boy staring at a story told in painted tiles around a fireplace, pictures in a picture in a picture. Michael was more fascinated by this endless regress than he’d been by all the spectacle and sparkle when he’d glimpsed the Attics of the Breath for the first time. Although the infant in the miniature didn’t resemble him, having dark hair styled in a pudding-basin cut and wearing buckled shoes with knee-length britches, Michael felt himself being sucked into the exquisite illustration. He was not sure anymore if he was Michael Warren, sitting in a kitchen eating cake and staring at a tile, or if he was the painted youngster leaning on his mother’s lap as she perched by the fire and pointed to the bible stories on the painted tiles around it. The warm room about him and its crowded table melted to a wet ceramic gloss, became a parlour in another century and doing so acquired a lustrous Prussian tint. His own hands were now cyan outlines on a wash of faint ultramarine and he was …
He was Philip Doddridge, six years old and learning scripture from his mother Monica, her blue-limned right arm round his shoulders as she read from the worn Bible resting on her slippery skirted thighs. She gestured with her other hand towards the Delft tiles round the fire by which she sat, each one emblazoned with a scene from the New Testament, a crucifixion or annunciation to illuminate the passage she was reading to her son. It was a rainy afternoon during the autumn months of 1708 and by the fireside of the drawing-room in Kingston-upon-Thames all things seemed holy. On the mantelpiece a pair of paper fans flanked an ornate brass clock enclosed within a giant bullet of clear glass, and royal blue firelight glistered on a lacquer screen to one side of the hearth. Monica Doddridge’s soft voice continued its instruction while her son’s glance darted back and forth over the beautiful Dutch tiling. Here an enormous Jonah was regurgitated by a whale no bigger than a chubby pike, while not far off a prodigal son in a periwig was welcomed back into the fold. So entranced was the boy in the beguiling tableaux that he almost felt a part of them, a nearly-turquoise figure underneath the glaze, perhaps an infant Jesus lecturing his dumbstruck elders on the temple steps. Becoming lost among the indigo embellishments, Philip composed himself and pulled back from the biblical scenarios before he was immersed completely. He was …
He was Michael Warren. He was sitting in a sunlit kitchen in Mansoul, gathered around a table with five other children and three grownups, all of whom were chattering convivially and paying Michael no attention whatsoever. Wondering what had just happened to him, he let his attention creep back to the tile-work, this time peering cautiously towards the second tile up from the bottom on the left. It didn’t look …
It didn’t look like much of an occasion, on that August morning in the Congregational Church there at Fetter Lane in 1714. Philly was twelve, a sickly sketch in blue fountain-pen ink, sitting between his father and beloved Uncle Philip in the front pew, listening to Mr. Bradbury the minister delivering his morning sermon. Philly’s mother had died suddenly three years before, and the frail, uncomplaining child did not believe his father or his uncle would be with him for much longer. It was not a family that knew rude health, with Philly and his elder sis Elizabeth the only two survivors out of twenty children and the other eighteen all dead before he was even born. A movement in the upper gallery roused Philly from his reverie and looking up he saw a falling handkerchief, a lacy thing with cornflower stippling, caught in its leisurely descent towards the flagged church floor. Everyone gasped except for the boy’s father, Daniel Doddridge, who began to cough. The kerchief was a signal, dropped deliberately by a messenger from Bishop Burnet to announce the passing of Queen Anne, the Stuart monarch who had done so much to harm their Nonconformist cause. Indeed, her latest effort to discomfit them, her Schism Act, was due to be made law that very day. It was a clear attempt to undermine the grand tradition of religious discontent that reached back to John Wycliffe’s Lollards in the fourteenth century or the great radical dissenter Robert Browne two hundred years thereafter. It attacked the faith of Bunyan and his revolutionary affiliates the Muggletonians, Moravians and Ranters, but the Schism Act would almost certainly now be abandoned with the passing of Queen Anne, its instigator. Shuffling on the hard pew Philly felt extremely nervous but was not sure why. Alerted by the signal from the gallery, the minister curtailed his sermon hurriedly and offered up a prayer for their new King, the Hanoverian George the First who had already sworn support for Nonconformity. By now the church was rustling with excited whispers and the thrilling realisation that the hated Anne was dead at last. Smiling with private satisfaction, Mr. Bradbury led the singing of the 89th Psalm before once more reading sternly from the text. “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.” Philly’s ears were ringing as he realised he was present at the dawn of a new age, an era of religious freedom that the boy could scarcely visualise. He felt …
He felt the hard edge of the kitchen chair pressing against his thighs, the sweet and slimy gobbet of unswallowed fairy cake at rest upon his tongue. He gulped it down and took a hasty swig of tea before inspecting the next tile. He found that he …
He found that he was dressed up in a nightgown and a borrowed petticoat, wearing a pudding-tin atop his dark hair as a helmet. He was twenty-one years old, performing Rowe’s play Tamerlane with friends and fellow students from the Dissenting academy in Kibworth, Leicestershire, acting the part of the illustrious Sultan Bazajet. All the impromptu cast were laughing until tears rolled down their cheeks, including good old Obadiah Hughes, whom they called Atticus, and little Jenny Jennings whom they nicknamed Theodosia, the daughter of the reverend conducting the academy. His own cognomen was Hortensius and as he flounced his lavender-blue skirts he wished that this hilarity could last forever, that he could somehow stop time and thus preserve the moment for eternity, a giggling and joyous fly in amber. The Lord knew that there’d been precious little laughter in Hortensius’s life thus far. An orphan at the tender age of thirteen, he’d been made ward to a gentleman named Downes who would lose all the lad’s inheritance to ruinous financial speculations in the City. Following a shiftless and unsettled period living with his big sister Elizabeth and her husband the Reverend John Nettleton, Hortensius had found a place in the Kibworth establishment, where by God’s grace had been instilled in him the discipline and the humility that would, he hoped, sustain him all his days. The Reverend John Jennings and his wife had been almost a second set of parents to the boy, so dear were they and so concerned with his development. It had astonished him to learn that Mrs. Jennings’ father had been one Sir Francis Wingate from Harlington Grange in Bedford, who’d committed poor John Bunyan unto Bedford gaol. Now, doubled over in his mirth with his makeshift tin helmet clattering down upon the floor and all his friends about him, he was stricken by the contrast between this frivolity and the abiding loneliness he felt throughout most other areas of his life. There was the passion that he felt for Kitty Freeman, his Clarinda as he called her, though he feared that his affections by and large went unrequited. Tripping on the lapis line that was his nightgown’s edge, thereby provoking renewed squeals of merriment, he wondered if some perfect partner waited in the future for him. Was that in God’s plan, if God’s plan should indeed include Hortensius? Did a wife and suitable vocation figure in that great, ineffable design? What was his destiny? What was …?
What was all this? Michael had the sensation he’d been cut adrift somewhere between this homely kitchen and the fine engraved world of the tiles, a gleaming china landscape rendered in the hues of billiard chalk with all of time reduced to thin blue strokes on white enamel. Though he knew that he was being helplessly pulled into each new image that he gazed upon, he found he couldn’t stop himself from looking. The euphoria that had accompanied the tea and cake surrounded Michael like a deep and fluffy blanket, dulling the anxiety that he would end up trapped amongst the painted curlicues. He let his scrutiny slide upwards to the next representation in the sequence. It looked …
It looked eerie, the diffusing morning mist, white on the sapphire brambles of the country lane; the travelling minister who’d paused to talk with a young woman clad in cross-hatched tatters, her eyes wide and bright against an almost imperceptible slate wash in the bucolic byway. Reverend Doddridge, passing through the villages about Northamptonshire and speaking to those congregations where he was invited, sat astride his patient mare and marvelled at the sallow and unearthly-looking girl who blocked his path. Her name was Mary Wills, and she was a respected prophetess from nearby Pitsford, a hedge-seer and a mystic who had called out to the pale, much-in-demand young preacher as he went upon his way. She seemed a thing assembled from the fog that trickled in the ditches, built with weeds or sodden deadfall, and she claimed that in her sight the future was a book already writ, a sculpted form encased within the iron mould of time. “ ‘And when he would not be persuaded, they ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done.’ Those ar
e the words of the first sermon you shall preach in the poor boroughs of Northampton, where it is that you shall be a pastor.” He would meet the ragged oracle again across the years and would come not to doubt her visions, yet upon this first occasion he was twenty-six years old and thought her prophecies a sham, though he was not unkindly or offhand to her in his behaviour. It was the business of a ministry here in Northampton, Doddridge thought, that gave the lie to her predictions. He had only just agreed to the entreaties of his colleagues within the Dissenting congregation, Dr. Watts and David Some and all the rest, who’d begged him to take up the running of the Dissenting academy at Market Harborough, a post made vacant by the passing of its former minister, the much-missed Reverend John Jennings. Wagons had already taken Doddridge’s belongings to the Harborough residence where Mrs. Jennings would continue managing household affairs, and Doddridge further entertained the hope of an affectionate relationship with Jennings’s delightful daughter, Jenny. The idea that he might be prevailed upon to sacrifice such an illustrious position for some draughty shack in the benighted districts of Northampton was therefore a senseless fancy that, he was assured, should never come to be. He thanked the weird child for her warnings and continued with his journey. There was …
There was no escaping the implacable progression of the tiles once Michael had surrendered to the tale’s compelling undertow. Drowning amongst the glassy blue-white breakers he gave up his feeble thrashing and went under, tumbling in the current of the narrative from one scene to the next. He didn’t really know …
He didn’t really know why he was doing this, leading his horse through delicate lace curtains of descending snow on Christmas Eve, towards the warm lights of the meeting-house on Castle Hill. He crunched through the crisp drifts over the burial ground, a stew of paupers’ ribs and plague-skulls somewhere underneath the ice crust and the frigid, powdery depths that it concealed. He had been settled into his academy at Market Harborough but a month or two when he’d received the earnest imprecations offered by the people of Northampton, that he should take up instead the ministry at Castle Hill here in the lowliest, western quarter of the town. The district was a crumbling eyesore that had been denied the pretty renovations undergone by the remainder of the township after the great fire, and he was anyway committed to his work at Harborough. He’d gracefully declined the offer, but the humble congregation were persistent. Finally the popular young reverend had chosen to deliver his refusal personally, gently conveying to his would-be flock that they should cease from their entreaties, by means of a sermon. This began “And when he would not be persuaded, they ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done”, and yet he had not thought of Mary Wills or her prediction until halfway through his sermon, where he found himself fulfilling it. The folk of Castle Hill, moreover, had seemed filled with such good will towards him that his thoughts were all in turmoil as he’d walked back to his lodgings at the foot of nearby Gold Street. Passing by an open door he’d heard a boy reading aloud from scripture to his mother, as the troubled reverend himself had done so many times, declaring, “As thy days, so shall thy strength be”, in a clear, true voice. The sentiment had been impressed upon him in that instant with great force, so that it seemed a revelation: all his days were part of Doddridge, part of his eternal substance, and he was comprised of nothing save those days, their thoughts and words and deeds. They were his strength. They were his all. He had decided there and then to give up his academy in Harborough and to accept instead the less promising post here in Northampton. His fellows, Mr. Some and Samuel Clark, had been outraged at first and begged that he should reconsider but had both reluctantly decided that, so strange were the events, a higher cause than theirs may have decreed the outcome in accordance with its own inscrutable agendas. And so here he was on Christmas Eve, trudging towards his destiny through blue-black shadows flecked with falling white. Only with difficulty could …
Only with difficulty could Michael remember anything about the kitchen or the cake. The blue-etched episodes were coming thick and fast now. He knew he was …
He knew he was meant for Mistress Mercy Maris from the moment he set eyes on her, there in the Worcester parlour of her great-aunt, Mrs. Owen. Six years younger than himself at twenty-two, with a good humour and a fresh complexion, she had been the bright jewel that he’d feared he was without the means to purchase. He’d but recently proposed to sixteen-year-old Jenny Jennings, yet upon being rebuffed had raised his siege and had considered himself pleased in her continuing friendship. The impulse that had possessed him, though, on that recent occasion, was as nothing to the passion that he felt towards Miss Maris, which had struck him like a very thunderbolt. He had persisted in his suit, unable to do otherwise, and found to his delight that his affections were reciprocated. They’d been wed upon the 29th day of November in 1730 at Upton-on-Severn, and his new wife had arrived to live with him here at Northampton, joining in enthusiastically with all his works despite the meanness of the neighbourhood. The local people had been models of good cheer and helpfulness, for all the squabbling that would break out between what may have been a dozen different Nonconformist creeds. Indeed, both he and Mrs. Doddridge found their congregation most agreeable despite the reputation it had earned for insurrection and unrest, this quiet nook where the most seditious of the ‘Martin Marprelate’ broadsides had been pseudonymously writ and published in the previous century. Had not Sir Humphrey Ramsden stated that Northampton was “a nest of puritans” in correspondence with John Lambe, describing the townspeople as “malignant, refractory spirits who disturb the peace of the church.”? And yet it was in this shire that churchgoers first insisted, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, upon hymn-singing at their ceremonies, where before were only chanted psalms. It was a good place, in its way a place holy as any other, and his wife and he were well to be here, although Mary Wills the prophetess had told him that their first attempt to bear a child would end in sadness. Still, perhaps on this occasion she should be proved wrong. After all, regarding his position on determinism, he stood …
He stood in the darkening church at Castle Hill and wept; gazed through a quivering salt lens at the small gravestone set amongst the floor tiles under the communion table. He’d believed the crying to be done with, and this sudden bout surprised him. It had no doubt been occasioned by the pamphlets, recently delivered from their printing company, one of which he held now in between his trembling hands. “Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children recommended and inforced, in a SERMON preached at NORTHAMPTON on the DEATH Of a very amiable and hopeful CHILD about Five Years old. Published out of compassion to mourning PARENTS By P. DODDRIDGE, D.D. Neve Liturarum pudeat : qui viderit illas. De Lachrymis factas sentiat esse meis. OVID. LONDON: Printed for R. HETT, at the Bible and Crown, in the Poultry. MDCC XXXVII. [Price Six-Pence.]” It had been writ more in tears than ink and now the former splashed down, further to dilute and blotch the latter. It was …
It was not, perhaps, so splendidly appointed as was the academy at Harborough, standing here in Sheep Street with the mouth of Silver Street just opposite, but Doddridge thought that in its practice it was quite the best in England. He and Mercy and their four surviving children had resided comfortably enough down at his previous establishment upon the corner of Pike Lane and Marefair, but with fresh students arriving every week to study scripture, mathematics, Latin, Greek or Hebrew it was evident that the Dissenting institution’s newer and considerably larger premises would be required to hold them all. He hoped …
He hoped it was his tolerance that had acquired for him so many worthy friends. His church enjoyed an amiable acquaintance with the Baptist ministry in College Lane, and in his private life he counted Calvinists, Moravians and Swedenborgians alike among his fellows. He stood now in George Row on a March morn in 1744, with his most valued and unlikeliest companion by his side. Mr. John Stonhouse had led an eventful, reckless life and had at one point even penned a tract attacking Christianity. One ev
ening, on his way to rendezvous with a loose woman, he had stopped to hear the famous Philip Doddridge speaking and upon the spot renounced his former ways, becoming a most steadfast ally of the doctor’s cause and helping him inaugurate a town infirmary, the first outside of London, which was the occasion that had called them to George Row upon this blustery morning. From the …
From the dark November sky above him firework flowers shed burning cream-and-cobalt petals in a rain on the Sheep Street academy, brightly illuminated by a horde of candles that had been arranged to spell out “KING GEORGE, NO PRETENDER”. Doddridge had been long aware how lucky the Dissenters were under this Hanoverian monarch, and had warned his congregation to be wary of a Stuart resurgence that might re-establish Catholic oppression. Now, though, in 1745, the threat was more than hypothetical, with Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the pretender to the British Throne, raising his standard at Glenfinnan and then marching south and into England. Doddridge, warned six years before of this eventuality by Mary Wills of Pitsford, was prepared. Enlisting his good friend the Earl of Halifax, he’d galvanised a parliament apparently indifferent to the Young Pretender’s threat and raised a force more than a thousand strong that had two hundred cavalry, most of them garrisoned here at Northampton. The Pretender, who had counted on strong Jacobite support that had not been forthcoming, was reputedly further discouraged by the news of armed men waiting just a little further south. He had already started his retreat back towards Scotland and, presumably, eventual ruin, hence these splendid bonfire celebrations. He rejoiced in …
He rejoiced in God’s great providence as he lay dying in the little country house a few miles outside Lisbon. He and Mercy, aided by donations from the kindly folk of Castle Hill, had been sent forth on a recuperative voyage to Portugal when his health, never sturdy, had at last begun to comprehensively decline. That sunlit country, in 1751, was famed for its good weather and for the restorative effects of its environment, though their advisers in Northampton clearly had not known that late October marked, traditionally, the commencement of the annual rainy season. Now it was approaching three o’clock on the black morning of the twenty-sixth. He listened to the downpour drumming on the roof and fancied that the end would not be long. Mercy herself was ill, a victim of the climate, and he knew that she could not assist him though she wanted to with all her heart. He thanked God for that loyal and beloved woman who had so enriched a goodly number of the forty-nine years he had spent on Earth. He thanked God for his life, its every triumph and reversal, for allowing him to further the Dissenting cause to the remarkable extent he had, forcing the church to recognise its Nonconformist brethren, and all this accomplished from the lowly mound where stood his humble meeting-house. Mercy was sleeping next to him. He heard the rain, and felt her breath upon his cheek. He closed …
He closed his eyes. Michael was under the impression that ghosts didn’t sleep, but then he’d thought that about eating until he’d been served the tea and fairy-cake. Sinking into a pinkish drowse he idly supposed that while dead people didn’t really need a meal or nap, they probably indulged in both things now and then, just for the simple pleasure of it. He could still hear all the other voices in the sunny kitchen, but they sounded far away and nothing much to do with him. He felt somebody – probably one of the Doddridge ladies – take the cup and saucer from his slackening grip before he spilled it on the floor. He’d either eaten his cake or already dropped it, but he didn’t know which and it didn’t matter.
Bill and Phyllis murmured to each other somewhere nearby. Bill was saying “Well, we must be gunna work out some way ’e can keep ’is memories, ’cause we’ve seen the pictures.” What did that mean? Were they talking about all the pictures on the tiles that Michael still felt half-submerged in? Elsewhere, Tetsy Doddridge was insisting that Drowned Marjorie should sign her name on something. “Won’t you be a sport? It shall take but a moment.” He could hear a faint and rhythmic beat that he at first took for his pulse before remembering he didn’t have one anymore and realising it must be the ticking of a kitchen clock, counting the moments of that timeless world.
At some point later on he was picked up by someone, one of the two older boys to judge from how it felt, and, judging from the clean and dry smell, probably not Reggie Bowler. That meant it was John who carried him, like a limp sack of flour against the taller youngster’s chest and shoulder, from the kitchen into the short passageway and on towards the parlour. Michael heard the other members of the gang clumping and clattering around them and presumed they were all leaving now that teatime was concluded. He was sure that if his mum Doreen were here she’d tell him to wake up, to thank the Doddridge family for having them and say goodbye to everybody properly. He did his best to rouse himself and tried to force his eyelids to creak open, but they wouldn’t budge and anyway he was too snug and comfortable in John’s arms for the moment. He remained content to let it all slip by him in a luminous and rosy fog.
They were now in the parlour and ahead of them he could hear Mr. Doddridge bringing to an end his conversation with the grey-robed builder chap, who Mrs. Gibbs had said was Mr. Aziel. Michael discovered that it was much easier to understand the strange, spiralling rubbish that the angles spoke if you were half asleep. From what he could make out, the gold-wigged doctor of divinity was still interrogating Mr. Aziel upon the subject of suspicious Sam O’Day, asking the worker how the different entities related to each other, all the devils and the ordinary people and the builders, and how all of these connected up to the mysterious “Third Borough”. Doddridge’s guest chuckled and said “Te wysh folm updint”, which instantly unravelled within Michael’s slumbering awareness into something that was only marginally more comprehensible:
“They fold up into you. You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.”
This seemed to both intrigue and satisfy the parson, who hummed thoughtfully before he ventured one last question to the amiable artisan.
“I see. And might I ask if, anywhere in this ingenious arrangement, any of us ever truly had Free Will?”